On the tiny Mediterranean island of Malta, two Italian hackers have been searching for bugs â not the islandâs many beetle varieties, but secret flaws in computer code that governments pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn about and exploit.
The hackers, Luigi Auriemma, 32, and Donato Ferrante, 28, sell technical details of such vulnerabilities to countries that want to break into the computer systems of foreign adversaries. The two will not reveal the clients of their company, ReVuln, but big buyers of services like theirs include the National Security Agency â which seeks the flaws for Americaâs growing arsenal of cyberweapons â and American adversaries like the Revolutionary Guards of Iran.